Roost by Ali Bryan Read Free Book Online Page A

straining to see, it creaks with my weight. There’s the sleeping bag in the back, and I yank it by the cord of its polyester sheath. It tumbles on top of me, like a fabric sausage. I pull until it’s completely free from its shell: navy plaid, unwashed, smelling like wood smoke. I climb inside.

12
    I wear sunglasses at breakfast
. We eat Corn Flakes. I don’t tell them about Grandma. I find a note from Turtle Grove in Joan’s backpack saying she needs more diapers. I search the house and manage to scrounge up four. It is an ordinary day. On the way to daycare we pass the same woman walking to work that we always do. Her gait and headband are the same. We get the red light by the high school. Wesley talks the entire way. Of zombies and Japan and the corn twists he never gets in his lunch. I want to tell him to shut up. I want to scream it.
    I park by the door and walk them inside. The daycare director approaches.
    “How’s your mom?” she says in a voice that’s just above a whisper.
    I shake my head. She covers her mouth.
    “I’m sorry,” she says touching my arm.
    “I haven’t told the kids yet.”
    “If you need anything, please don’t hesitate —”
    “I could only find four diapers,” I interrupt.
    She waves me off and says, “Don’t worry about the diapers.”
    I call work from the car and share the news. Stroke on a plane. No slippers in the morgue.
    Then I drive by my parents’ house where the swing is still broken and the trees have lost all their leaves. The house looks different this morning. Locked up and less an owner. Quiet and weary after decades of dirty hands and grass clippings andChristmas lights. A package juts out of the mailbox. I park and walk up the driveway, stepping over the cracks in the asphalt as I have since childhood, and I pick up the mail. Along with a package addressed to my father is a coupon for ten percent off furnace cleaning. Will she be cremated? I toss both the flyer and the package in the front passenger seat and drive home.
    When
The View
comes on, I cry because Elisabeth’s a Republican and Barbara pretends she’s not an octogenarian. She thinks she’s fifty like a dog thinks it’s human. When Glen calls, I explain this to him, between spoonfuls of my second bowl of Corn Flakes.
    “Why are you home?” he asks.
    “My mother died last night. On the plane.”
    “On the plane?”
    “They were coming home from Cuba.”
    “I thought you said she was okay?”
    “She was okay! She had a stroke.”
    “Because she hit her head?”
    “I don’t know Glen, I’m not a friggin’ doctor. I just know she had a stroke. On the plane. Were you calling for something specific?”
    “No, I was just going to leave a message. I think I left my sunglasses there. I’m coming over.”
    We hang up and I yell at Barbara, “You’re fucking eighty!”
    Glen shows up with apple turnovers from Costco and Kleenex with the built-in lotion.
    “I brought you some ginger ale,” he says, twisting off the cap.
    “I’m not sick, Glen.”
    “I know but I didn’t know what else to get.”
    He hands me the bottle and parks himself on the coffee table. “I’m sorry, Claud.”
    He paces around the room when my father calls. Dad’s thoughts are all over the place.
    “Your mom loved carnations. The price of gas went up overnight. Dan has never eaten a hard-boiled egg.”
    I respond with like comments: “Joan wants to be a cat squirrel for Halloween. I think Mom would want a white casket. One of those glossy ones like the cabinets you see in the show homes. There are forty grams of fat in a carrot muffin.”
    Glen gives me an odd look and turns off
The View
. Dad asks what a cat squirrel is and explains that Mom wanted Stompin’ Tom Connors played at her funeral.
    “What song?” I am only able to recall the Hockey Song and the PEI tourism jingle. Dad does not reply. I hear him ask Dan where his glasses are. Glen holds up a turnover. I nod and he puts one on a